Go-Cart Track Takes Scalped Customer's Safety Very Seriously

By consumerist.comMarch 13, 2008

WHO: A Utah Go-Cart trackWHAT: A woman’s long hair got tangled in the moving parts of a go-cart and her hair, scalp, and ear were ripped from her head.WHERE: WDEFTHE QUOTE: “The owner of the go-cart track says… this was an extremely unfortunate accident that he feels horrible about…He also said the company takes safety of its customers very seriously.”

“Taking it seriously” is a phrase companies use over and over again in public statements whenever they have bad PR. Our series of posts on occurrences of the phrase is our attempt to question how seriously companies are really taking these matters if every time they trot out this phrase by rote.

I saw this on the news the other day. That woman got messed UP! Scapled & lost an ear (though surgeons put it all back together, but she is going to have some scars). I also remember seeing a sign posted that warned against riding with longer-than shoulder length hair.

Woman ignored/failed to see warning signs about long hair at go-cart park.
Woman gets hair caught in go-cart.
Woman has scalp/ear ripped off.
Woman is cut out of go-cart with scissors.
Woman expected to make a full recovery.

She actually acknowledged that the signs were there, but said they really should be warning people because the signs aren’t enough.

In a rare fit of compassion, I’m going to go with the victim here. Yes, she should have common sense, since she has unusually long hair she needs to take precautions. However, the Go Kart place, for the sake of safety, should be ensuring the safety of their customers. This means the track attendants should watch for potential safety hazards and alert customers as needed.

I’m sure they take the time to monitor the track and kick people out for rough behavior/crashing karts. They should be watching for this and other safety problems too.

we dont need to become any more of a nanny-state than we already are. common sense rules over all… there was signage, and she still didnt heed the signs, saying someone should have held her hand and treated her like a 5-year old.

sorry, i believe in personal responsibility for adults. had there been no warning, i would side with you… but she was properly warned and failed to heed the warning. if she sues the owner/operator, her family/friends with her should have to cough up too for not holding her hand either.

I’m not saying that the go-kart company is at fault, but some of you seem absolutely without compassion.

Let’s say someone is the operator of a roller-coaster. This coast has a particular section where someone about 6’3″ would be likely to ding the top of their head. Would you just have a sign posted saying, “All people all over 6’3″ should not ride this ride” and then shrug if someone ignores it and gets a concussion (let’s say it is a slow coaster)?

In this case, it wouldn’t have been a nanny state to have someone on the floor to stop a racer racing unsafely. I agree with NotATool.

I am representing a woman in a case like this in Washington State. This accident was an easily preventable tragedy. A simple piece of plastic covering the rear wheel axle would prevent this from happening. There is no excuse for the manufacturer and company to not have a cover on the axle to prevent this. There have been numerous recalls over the years for this and there is NO EXCUSE for anyone in the industry not to know that if they leave rear wheel axles uncovered that hair and clothing can become entangled and serious injury can occur. There have been a lot of scalpings around the country: children have been scalped, people have been decapitated, and people have been left quadriplegic after the rear wheel axle rips their heads backwards. The fault lies not with the user, who had no reason to expect her scalp and ear to get ripped off, but with the manufacturer and operating company, who could not possibly have been unaware of this risk, and failed to take such a simple low cost step to prevent it. Also, most states require go kart operators to have inspections. They obviously didn’t comply with this requirement. If they had been inspected, they would have been shut down immediately for such a dangerous condition.

Been to Go-Kart tracks in NJ and MD and they have signs posted about hair, and like Ben mentioned other long/loose/flowing apparel. Most tracks will require you to pull your hair back. I have long hair and have experienced it.

If I were carting and hadn’t seen this vivid illustration that the danger is for real, I might have ignored it too. But in my interview with CNN, I would have conceded that well, shit, now I know to heed the warning and I hope others learn from my example.

The place could offer some sort of hair tie to people with long hair. They’re pennies a dozen.

@snowpuff: “Taking it seriously” is a phrase companies use over and over again in public statements whenever they have bad PR. Our series of posts on occurrences of the phrase is our attempt to question how seriously companies are really taking these matters if every time they trot out this phrase by rote. Hey, I just wrote a great explainer, maybe we should append this comment to the bottom of every “taking it seriously” post.

It depends on the service of the gokart track you go to. Some tracks are really nice, but then there are others that just don’t care and the teenage employees will allow anything to go on basically. I have been to many gokart tracks and I have seen both types. There is one track here that I have sworn off forever because they allow everyone to crash into each other in the pits (which if you know what I am talking about, is a very dangerous situation). My hair isn’t even past my shoulders now but I have experienced this in the past. A gokart track that cares won’t let you ride unless you put your hair up.

Most of these places have lots of ride at your own risk signs up though.

@oakie: Actually, roll cages would be pretty damn cool. They can be weighted on the top so every turn you make lets you happily flip and roll around, crash into other cars and knock them about with a satisfying billiard “thunk”.

I’d make MILLIONS! And, heh, pay those millions out to cover the insurance premiums. Pity.

@BensAngel: Do you show up late to movies and complain that you don’t understand the plot?

Consumerist is not just about “consumers” but also about business and companies of all kinds. A Go-Kart track is a business, no? Also, try checking the tags and noting the “Taking It Seriously” tag. Do a little research before making snide comments.

Yeah, its because of jackasses like this that when you buy a ladder it has like 37 safety stickers on it and when you buy a lawnmower it has to have a hideous sticker on it telling you not to put your hand under the deck when the engine is running. I hate buying things and having 37 stickers on them making them look ugly.

In 1971, when I was 9 years old, we moved into a newly developed neighborhood, and the 2 adjacent as-yet-undeveloped lots included a “Go-cart” track that local teens had carved out. My babysitter, somehow, allowed me to drive one of these go-karts — she was riding my banana-seat Huffy bicycle around the cul-de-sac while I had my “test drive” — and I RAN RIGHT INTO HER! I have a VERY vivid memory of her coming back to my folks’ house, showing her scraped up leg, and saying, “Look what your son did to me.” I also have a very vivid memory of my folks’ shrugging and essentially saying, “Well, too bad, you were in charge –“

It’s not that I have no sympathy for the customer. Yes, it’s very unfortunate that she is so injured, and I wish her a good recovery.

But the sign said it. No long hair. I used to have long hair, and tied it up in a bun before riding go karts, or pretty much any amusement park amusements/rides. Would it be nice if the attendants stopped anyone who might have been breaking a safety rule? Yes, that would be excellent. But in this case, the customer did not take her own safety seriously enough. People need to realize that your health/happiness is largely in your own hands, not in the hands of drive-thru attendants, baristas, carnival ride attendants, or other service people.

As far as the letter–I wonder if it came from someone who was as frustrated about the thoughtlessness of the woman as many of the commentors here are?

Again, best of luck to the injured woman. I hope that she is well and that other people have the opportunity to learn from her egregious mistake.

@NotATool: You can’t approach people about that because they’ll become offended and sue. Just look at how the fatties get upset when theme park attendants tell them they’re too large to safely ride the rides.

The track posted signs, the woman noticed said signs and blatantly disregarded them, the woman got to experience just why those signs were there.

I’m gonna have to come down on the side of the Go-Kart track with this one. There was apparently a warning sign in the actual kart saying, “Warning, do not do this, serious injury may result” and then she went ahead and did it, and got injured. I’m terribly sorry for her, but she did something stupid and the physical world punished her for it.

We need LESS safety warnings, not more. I prefer to buy my knives without “Warning, do not stick this knife in your eye” stickers on them.

Ouch. My hair is down to my ass, I wear it up all the time, it’s almost dangerous to even drive a regular car with long hair hanging in your peripheral vision, I can’t imagine going go-carting with it flying around like that…

But really I’m extra sensitive about these sorts of occurances, because when I was 11 I got my big toe partially severed when I was riding a cup and saucer ride in sandals.

@jimharris: Yes, it’s ridiculous that they make go carts with open axles. Just like how it’s ridiculous how they make blenders with open blades and toasters with open slots for the bread. It’s absolutely negligent that manufacturers don’t make all knives dull so that someone can’t accidentally stab themselves or someone else. Don’t they know that serious injury can occur?

I wonder if this lady signed the indemnity waiver (like most go kart places have) before she drove the thing. Moreover I wonder if she read it before she signed it. I bet not, since she can’t be bothered to read a big metal sign in her kart.

I’ll bet the race track owners are taking this matter just as seriously as she took the signs warning her about her hair.

On a personal note, years ago I taught a machine shop class at a local college. An Indian woman (with beautiful long black hair) *almost* get her scalp ripped off while she was cutting threads on a lathe. Had I not been right next to her when her ponytail got caught (and thus able to shut the machine off in a second), it would have been ugly. We had signs about long hair and jewelry; I had warned people the first day of class in the usual safety lecture; a terrible accident could have happened anyways. It wasn’t South Bend (the lathe manufacturer)’s fault, wasn’t mine, wasn’t the college.

Despite our best precautions, users can get careless around powerful machinery and accidents do happen. Go-Karts and lathes need to be a little dangerous, otherwise they wouldn’t work for their intended purpose. The whole point of a kart is that it’s low-to-the-ground, open-wheeled, and cheap to fix and operate. Remove those aspects of a kart, and guess what– you’ve got a car!

Anyways, to end the story: Next class, much to the dismay of her very traditional-minded husband, her hair was very short, a cute bob. She was actually thrilled, she would have never been able to get such a modern ‘do without an extreme excuse.

If this woman had been trying to ride a roller coaster, you can bet she would have been warned and warned again and then not let on the ride if she did not put her hair back. Lawsuits are too common for businesses to not take customer safety seriously.

@Shevek: the severity of the injury has nothing to do with how/why it happened. The fact is that there was signage. personal responsibility

Let’s go with your roller coaster, if there was a sign stating that 6’3″ was too tall and you kept measuring everyone over 6′, people would be complaining about that and there would be guys/gals over 6’3″ taking off shoes or slouching to make the requirement. trust me that does happen a lot in reverse with kids that are too short. their parents would help them make the height requirement so they could go on the ride, totally ignoring the fact that the requirement was for the safety of their child.

So who wants to bet that if the owner told her she couldn’t ride the kart because her hair was too long she would have cried discriminaion. I tell ya you just can’t win with people. It wasn’t that long ago when being scalped was not that uncommon, and hell all you had to do to get it then was force some people off the land they lived on for generations. That is an Indi…er I mean Native American joke by the way.

(Devil’s Advocate time) I have to side with common sense on this one. The girl had long hair around moving machinery, unsecured and dangling within reach of the parts on the kart. The operators of the track should have stopped her, handed her a hair net, beret or something to keep her hair from getting caught in it. Or at least warned her verbally of the danger. Lack of common sense and self-preservation is paramount in this matter.

it’s 50/50 responsibility folks. Signage is not enough (many adults can’t read) and you have to assume people are retards these days.

WHile the woman should have known better, unless she was a go-kart expert you can’t assume that. Many accidents happen to people because they couldn’t imagine the consequences of an action, or don’t think it will happen to them. This is called, “finding out the hard way”.

How many oil stains does that woman have on her clothes from getting caught in car doors? Odds are, plenty.

I don’t know what sort of operation that track was, but every go-kart track I go to has a liability waiver and a set of written rules you have to sit and read before you pay and use it, plus mandatory helmets and jumpsuits (to cover skin and loose clothing). Even if the track doesn’t sit down with you to read it, not going through the procedures is just plain stupid.

This goes beyond plain “common sense” and into self-preservation. I can have no more empathy for that woman than for someone with three foot long hair who drowns after getting caught in a pool drain.

The worst accidents I have ever seen at tracks have always been due to idiocy and inexperience: parents putting their kids on carts with no driving skills (weaving, doing doughnuts in the middle of the track, not looking over their shoulders) and adults who overestimate what they can do and underestimate what the go-kart can do. I have only ever seen one accident due to employee negligence (speeding into the pit lane and rear-ending someone, causing whiplash) and none due to poor maintenance or the type of cart.

Bad (dumb/lazy) consumer, plain and simple. Her comment about “signs aren’t enough” should be read as “I’m stupid and lazy and couldn’t be bothered to read the posted warnings and actually follow them”.

Go Kart = Machinery. You don’t go near machinery with long hair/neckties/loose clothing.

The thing is gokarts and amusement rides are marketed to the customer as fun amusement devices that have no danger whatsoever. The general public DOES NOT see the danger involved with these amusements, they do not see them as big machines with moving parts, they see them as nothing but fun! Some people here have never experienced the type of clientele these theme parks and family fun centers attract, and some people have. A warning sign is NEVER enough, and the more warnings you have, the more people try to disobey them. The general public almost never takes warning signs seriously. Putting a NO CLIMBING sign on a display in the middle of a park is a great way to get kids to climb all over it. Parents don’t care and they expect the ride operators and theme park staff to babysit their children, but that is irrelevant here.

The gokart track should know this, they should assume that basically everyone is stupid and instruct patrons to put their long hair up before they ride, or else they cannot ride period. The tracks that I have been to are often too quick to shove anyone on the cart without proper instruction or any safety rules at all (even if its a young kid who is unsure if they want to ride or not), and sometimes you cannot hear the OP telling you the safety rules over the roar of all the cart engines. Sometimes they come around and check the seatbelts but thats it.

If they have signs up stating this, then its their job to enforce it. Its not discrimination if they have large signs up about it that the public can easily view, the only thing the employees would be doing by preventing a patron with long hair from riding is enforcing the rule.

@KJones: I haven’t been to this particular track, but I have been to a few in Utah – and I’m guessing regulations here are pretty lax. I’ve only been to go-cart tracks that are at a family fun center, similar to the place she was at – there was no contract, no helmet, no jumpsuit. I put my hair into a multi-banded ponytail and stuck it inside my shirt.

I’m pretty sure even if you put hair as long as hers (mine is only mid-back) into just a ponytail with one rubber band, she could still be at risk for it flying up/out/around (thus why I stuck my hair inside my shirt, which worked pretty well since it was tight enough to hold my hair still…

But don’t assume that they gave her a helmet and a jumpsuit and training – places around here don’t seem to require that sort of thing.

The fun center places here that market to the birthday party crowd are exactly like this, they don’t require helmets, jumpsuits or anything like that, in fact we didn’t even have a simple lapbelt on our gokarts until maybe the mid 90s. Now every gokart has 4 point harnesses thank god, I couldn’t imagine driving a gokart without at least that. I hear the gokarts don’t even have seatbelts in Wisconsin dells but they are quick to throw you off the track if you do anything stupid. The only restriction here is that you must be 54 inches I think, so anyone over 54 inches who goes into one of these places gets quickly shoved into a car without any instruction or maybe something simple, depending on what kind of place you go to. Some are better than others. Hint if you see kids slamming each other when they are parked in the pits of the gokart track, run away fast!

I think SaraAB86 really said what I was trying to say about the severity of the injury. If I were to go to a go-kart place and see a sign about long hair, it wouldn’t occur to me that the reason was because my hair was possibly going to be ripped out of my head. I would have assumed that these were safe overall–fun for the whole family!–and that possible injuries would be minor. That a serious injury could occur really blows my mind and I think changes this situation.

And I stick by my roller coaster example: if that coaster had only an injury every other month due to customer negligence, I’d bet it would either be shut down, remodeled, or that its owning company would pay an awful lot more attention towards enforcing the rule.

I don’t, by the way, blame the management in this case. The customer didn’t follow the rule. But I had also don’t believe she would have broke it if she had been properly informed of the risks. And it seems to me that it behooves the management to more conscientious with regard to safety.

@rhondalicious: I haven’t been to this particular track, but I have been to a few in Utah – and I’m guessing regulations here are pretty lax. I’ve only been to go-cart tracks that are at a family fun center, similar to the place she was at – there was no contract, no helmet, no jumpsuit. I put my hair into a multi-banded ponytail and stuck it inside my shirt.

That’s part of the problem of some places. As I said before:

[E]very go-kart track I go to has a liability waiver and a set of written rules you have to sit and read before you pay and use it, plus mandatory helmets and jumpsuits (to cover skin and loose clothing).

I wouldn’t go to a track that didn’t have such safety measures (and required close-toed shoes, I forgot to mention). If they don’t have equipment and procedures, odds are the maintenance will also be terrible. It’s like any other product – you wouldn’t eat at a restaurant with rats, so why do something dangerous with no obvious safety measures?

Myself, I’m the wannabe/neverwas type who goes as fast as possible. I’ve had a few crashes (misjudging a corner and getting an eight inch knee bruise and a four day limp from banging the steering wheel) and been the victim of someone else’s stupidity (a kid who saw me and weaved in front of me as I was passing), but I’ve never hit anybody else or caused a crash because I pay attention.

@Shevek: Heh, if a rollercoaster injures anyone in a serious manner (other than bumps, bruises and minor scrapes), it would be shut down, re-inspected and then evaluated. If necessary the manufacturer would issue a service bulletin, and then what would happen is the ride would not be allowed to operate until the service bulletin was satisfied.

There is a certain level of responsibility involved with amusement rides and gokarts (obviously, you shouldn’t make an attempt to jump out of the coaster while its moving, or try to undo the seatbelt, or something similar), but there is a human factor involved in this. Management of the gokart place should have known that people are not capable of following signs these days, how many people have you seen at your local amusement park actually stop and READ the signs, thats right, no one. Its just human nature to ignore these signs. So if there is a real danger the employees should explain this to the customer before riding, this goes for pretty much any amusement. The carnival ride ops here are very good with that, everyone gets verbal instructions about where to sit on the ride and how to behave on it (even if your an adult), and if you don’t follow it, you get thrown off the ride. And YES I have seen many guests get thrown off the rides here, the carnival ride ops here are not afraid to keep their rides safe.

I dunno about anyone else, but if I was holding my kid’s birthday party at a place like this, I would go there before hand and watch their operations to make sure it was safe, its pretty easy to tell when a place cares and when it doesn’t. I wouldn’t want to be responsible if a group of kids got injured. Is the place in question following the posted rules, are there a lot of kids there that don’t know what they are doing, could this be dangerous to the activity, are there teenage ride ops that are doing things other than working when they are supposed to be working etc..

I see a lot of people stressing personal responsibility here. I think that goes for the kart driver, as well as the manufacturer and the person running go kart establishment.

I see a lot of people stressing rules here as well. The ASTM has safety standards for go karts. These rules are supposed to be followed for the safety of people. Most US manufacturers know the rules and follow them. They do so out of a sense of responsibility, because of the horrible injuries that can occur if they do not. They do so because it doesn’t cost any more to put a safe guard over the axle as opposed to just one that is for looks. And they do so because they law requires that they have safety inspections before they rent karts out.

But you see foreign manufacturers who sell karts over here who do not comply with the law and the ASTM standards. And people get hurt.

Shouldn’t the foreign manufacturers of go karts have to follow the same rules as American ones? Shouldn’t they be held responsible when they don’t? And when a business violates the law and doesn’t have safety inspections, and rents foreign made go karts that are unsafe, shouldn’t they also be responsible?